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Friday, October 23, 2009

Office 2004 for Mac Easter Egg

Okay, so I take no credit for finding or reporting this. I learned how from here: http://macfixer.blogspot.com/2006/12/microsoft-office-2004-easter-egg.html

I thought it was cool enough to share again...so here it is.

Somehow at work I started thinking about easter eggs in programs. It's been a while since I have heard of one, and so I was wondering if there were any new one's out there. For those of you that aren't aware, an easter egg is fun feature sometimes hidden in software. Often, these are in the form of little games, but sometimes appear in other forms. Here is a great page on different easter eggs in Microsoft Products: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_products

I don't really have any of these old versions around anymore...but I did happen to have Office 2004 for Mac. I thought I would take a moment to check out that easter egg. It's pretty fun.

SO...if you have Office 2004 for Mac, and you want to play a quick game of Asteroids that is hidden within it...here's how:

Open the "Microsoft Office Notifications" application. I found it in /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office. Once opened you will get a dialog box like this:

At the top of your screen, you should now see the Office Notifications toolbar that looks like this:

Select Office Notifications, and then WHILE HOLDING DOWN CONTROL-OPTION-COMMAND, click on "About Office Notifications"

You should see the following dialog box:

Notice the little black box above the "OK" button? That is the the way to get to Asteroids. If you didn't hold down CONTROL-OPTION-COMMAND, you will get the normal dialog box like this:

See, no Asteroids icon. So go back and try it again. You want to see that icon. Once you get that, you can click it to get into a game of Asteroids right there inside the dialog box!

So there you have it! Asteroids...hidden inside the Office Notifications App. Enjoy!